1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic file approval management system for managing an approval process of an electronic document.
2. Description of Related Art
In a prior art approval process method of an electronic document (hereafter referred to as a document), a creator of the document prints the document using a printer, and an approver confirms the printed document and impress a stamp. In such a method, when the printed document has a problem such as misdescription, the printed document is returned to the creator, is reedited and is reprinted, causing a problem of wasting the printed document being already confirmed, etc.
Japanese Un-examined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-165844 discloses an authentication/approval system as a method for solving such a problem described above by a document print system having a client apparatus and a printer connected through an information communication network such as a network. The client apparatus adds print control information having restriction information of document print and instruction information for printing a predetermined image to document data and transmits to the printer, and the printer prints the document according to the control information and the predetermined image according to the instruction information based on the print control information and document data transmitted from the client apparatus.
In such a prior art technique, however, a special printer or an authentication server recognizing the print control information of the document to be printed by the document creator is needed to be provided beforehand. In addition, such a printer or an authentication server needs to register collation information of the document as database beforehand so as to collate the print control information, resulting in a difficulty of adopting such a prior art technique in terms of cost and environment.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an electronic file approval management system capable of reducing an unnecessary printed matter when the electronic file is returned to the creator during the approval process of the document by the approver, and not requiring a special device or an authentication server for executing the approval process. Moreover, the electronic file approval management system is capable of completing the approval process without labor of impressing a stamp by the approver on the document printed by the creator in the approval process of the document.